Issues in Designing a Prescription Drug Benefit for Medicare

摘要

Medicare offers broad insurance protection for many health needs of the nation's elderly and disabled residents, but it provides no coverage for the costs of most outpatient prescription drugs. As spending for those drugs has soared in recent years, adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare has become a top health issue for lawmakers. However, designing such a benefit as a freestanding addition to the existing Medicare program has proved difficult-in part because the design choices involve trade-offs among a number of competing policy goals. This Congressional Budget Office study discusses CBO's approach to estimating the costs of various designs for a Medicare prescription drug benefit. The study describes the broad choices available to policymakers, some problems raised by particular design choices, and the implications of those choices for the cost of four specific proposals, which together cover a wide spectrum of approaches for delivering a Medicare drug benefit. In keeping with CBO's mandate to provide objective, impartial analysis, this study makes no recommendations.